The Henricksen Files
by Ante Down
Summary: Victor Henricksen's job is to take in the Winchester brothers, not necessarily alive. It's been his job for weeks. But tracking down the Winchesters isn't easy. How Henricksen's followed the trail over the course of season two.
1. The Unusual Case

**Disclaimer: **Not mine.

**A/N: **Written because there just isn't enough Henricksen fic out there. (There's not enough Gordon fic out there either, but that's another matter entirely.) So I decided to write for a fandom I (gasp) don't usually write for. On with the show.

**The Unusual Case (The Usual Suspects)**

"You might find that interesting, Vic," Henricksen's boss, Palmer, said one Wednesday afternoon, handing him a case file. "You've been asking me for something good for a while now. Here it is. The Winchester brothers, recently escaped from custody in Baltimore."

"Escaped from custody? Sir, I-" Henricksen began to respond, but he was forestalled by a raised hand.

"Just read it, Vic. It's better than it sounds."

It was. It was engrossing.

Dean Winchester was twenty-seven and had been wanted for the murder of a young woman in St. Louis when he had apparently been shot dead. And yet he had somehow been arrested, very much alive and with blood on his hands, at another murder scene. Aside from the murders, there was a long, long list of crimes. Arson, the odd theft, fourteen unpaid parking tickets and a few other traffic violations, breaking and entering, trespassing, destruction of property, impersonating a whole range of officials, more than a decade's worth of credit card fraud and, strangely, grave desecration.

Sam Winchester was twenty-three, six foot five, and unlike his brother had only a very short rap sheet, the only charge being along the lines of accessory. In fact, his profile painted quite a different picture. He had been a straight-A student who had somehow got a full ride to Stanford and then a ridiculously high LSAT score. He'd had a law school interview and a damn fine girlfriend. But the night before the interview, the girlfriend had died in a fire and Sam Winchester had vanished with his brother, only staying long enough for the funeral.

After the profiles there were the details of their escape from Baltimore. Dean had been arrested, then Sam. But Baltimore's finest had not treated either with enough respect. Sam Winchester had escaped through a fourth-storey window, for Christ's sake. And the statement from Detective Ballard-

Henricksen snorted. Baltimore's finest indeed. "Hey, Reid," he called to his partner. "Come have a look at this."

Reid quietly perused the documents on offer. When he had finished, he turned to Henricksen, eyebrows raised. "I guess we're going to Baltimore," he said.

"Damn right we're going to Baltimore," Henricksen replied.

------

The police station in Baltimore was dark and damp. Even the offices looked like cells. A few inquiries led Henricksen and Reid to a blonde woman in her forties working diligently at her computer. There were fading bruises on her wrists, Henricksen noted. Almost like she'd been tied up.

"Diana Ballard?"

She didn't look up at them immediately, but did say "Detective Ballard," with a slight emphasis on Detective.

"Special Agents Henricksen and Reid, F.B.I. We're here about the Winchester case."

Ballard looked up from her work then, but didn't look entirely surprised. "You already have my statement," she said coolly. "I don't see why this is necessary."

Henricksen did not miss a beat. "Well, it is. We'd like you to tell us what happened again."

Ballard remained silent. "We can do this somewhere else, if you'd like," Reid said.

Detective Ballard did not respond straight away, instead thinking it over for a bit. But then she seemed to come to a decision. "Well then, Special Agents," she said, taking the lead. "I'd like to get this over with."

It was a good decision, Henricksen thought.

------

She led them not into an interrogation room, but a small office. The boxes around the walls indicated that it was being cleared out. "This was Pete Sheridan's office," Ballard said, gesturing towards a chair and taking the second one herself. Reid was left standing.

"Your partner." It wasn't a question.

"He was," was the perfectly neutral response. It distanced her from all of her partner's actions.

"So let's go over this. Dean Winchester was found at a crime scene with Karen Giles' blood on his hands. Giles had made a 911 about ten minutes earlier, stating that someone was in the house. And yet Dean Winchester did _not_ kill her?" Henricksen questioned.

Still keeping her voice perfectly level, Ballard responded, "That's right."

Henricksen shook his head. "Those are some long odds. What are the chances that he stumbled into a murder scene just minutes after the murder was committed? Reid?"

"Very long odds," Reid said, following his partner's lead.

"But that's not really why we're here," Henricksen continued, "We wanted to ask you more about what happened later." He leaned forwards. "You can start with Sam Winchester's escape."

Ballard narrowed her eyes. "Like I said in my statement. Dean sent a note to his brother with their lawyer. I'm sure you have a copy. Sam read it and climbed out the window. I don't know what he did then, but we think he set up near here and did some of his own investigating."

"Then what?"

"I left the station. I was feeling unwell. Sam intercepted me and told me what he'd found out. He took me to Ashland Street, and we found Claire's body. Then we went to try and find Pete."

"And Dean?"

Ballard continued in the same reasonable monotone. "My partner was interrogating Dean. He lost his temper. Assaulted him. After I had left the station, at around two in the morning, he decided to transfer Dean to St. Louis by himself. Sam and I caught up with him just outside town."

"Speaking of which, Detective Ballard, why didn't you take Sam straight back to the station?"

She clearly didn't take well to this criticism of her professional abilities. "Time was of the essence. I believed that Sheridan would have killed Dean. Saving his life was my priority. Also, Sam escaped our custody once. He probably would have done so again."

"What happened next?"

"We caught up with Sheridan outside of town," she repeated. "He'd already removed Dean from the back of the vehicle and had a gun on him. He confessed to killing Tony and Karen Giles, as well as Claire. He also confessed to stealing heroin from lockup, using Claire to sell the heroin and Tony Giles to launder the profits. He admitted he was planning to kill me. We fought. I shot Sheridan in the struggle."

"And yet the Winchesters escaped."

"I was distraught. I turned my back."

Henricksen raised his eyebrows. "Distraught? Detective, you don't strike me as the type."

Her expression visibly hardened. "Pete was my partner. We were in a relationship. And I'd just found out that he had killed his friends and wanted to kill me. My superiors excused me."

"How long would you say your back was turned for?" Henricksen asked, taking down a few notes.

"Only a minute or two. When I turned around, both of them were gone."

"Oh, you got suckered good, Detective. Those boys played you like pros. Well, they are."

Ballard leaned forwards. "Those boys saved me. They helped me catch a killer. They did nothing wrong here." She withdrew a bit. "Are we done? I'm rather busy at the moment."

Henricksen didn't answer, just closed his folder. Reid answered instead. "Yes, I think we are. We'll let you know if we want to talk to you again."

Detective Ballard stood up and nodded at them on her way out. "Special Agents. It's been a pleasure."

As Detective Ballard reached for the doorknob, however, Henricksen spoke again. "How did you get those bruises? Almost looks like you've been tied up."

Ballard tugged her sleeves back over her wrists and said, coldly this time, "That's none of your business, Special Agent."

"Did the Winchesters do that?"

Now Ballard was openly glaring at them. "It has nothing to do with the Winchesters. The details of my romantic involvement with Pete are not relevant to your investigations and I would appreciate it if we left that line of questioning there. Good afternoon."

------

Back in the car and driving back to Washington, Henricksen took his eyes off the road for a second and turned to Reid. "So, what'd you think?"

"It's exactly what's in her statement. But she's not telling us everything, I'm sure."

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Henricksen turned back to the road. "Anything else interesting in those files?"

Reid shuffled the paper around a bit. "Well, if you look at Dean's statement about the original crime, and then Sam's, they're practically identical."

"So they're lying about what they were doing in Baltimore." This, Henricksen thought, was a given, but it was the sort of thing they had to confirm.

"Looks like it. I'll check their story about Tony Giles meeting John Winchester in the Marines when we get back to base."

Reid continued, "Any ideas on how the Winchesters found out it was Sheridan committing those murders?"

Henricksen shook his head. "Not a one. It took forensics days to corroborate the Winchesters' story. Sheridan didn't exactly keep a list of his crimes on paper. And besides Ballard and the Winchesters, who heard Sheridan confess?"

"I've never heard anything like it," Reid said, shaking his head.

"And that St. Louis thing," Henricksen went on. "Dean Winchester was declared officially dead. Positive identification. They buried him and nobody touched that grave. I have no idea how he did that either."

A brief look of sympathy. "St. Louis PD not got back to you yet?"

"Nope."

They didn't speak again until they got back to base.

------

"Hey, Reid, fax for you," Agent Cook said about an hour after they'd returned. "From the Marines."

Reid took the proffered pages, and he smiled slightly as he read them. "Vic, we were right. Tony Giles and John Winchester likely never met. Winchester was stationed in Vietnam, and Giles worked stateside. The boys were lying through their teeth."

Henricksen also smiled, but replied, "You do realise this raises the question of what they were doing in Baltimore in the first place."

"Maybe they were just passing through. Any luck with St. Louis?"

"Not yet. But no way they were just passing through. There's method to the madness somewhere here. I don't think this was random. And if we work out what they want, we can catch them."

And Henricksen had every confidence in his ability to work out that method.


	2. Blood

**Disclaimer: **Not mine.

**A/N: **REPOSTED. Because, as Isobel Swan kindly pointed out, my characterisation kinda sucked. Serves me right for not doing a thorough rewatch before I write, I suppose. The next chapter will be more carefully edited.

**Blood (Skin)**

The St. Louis PD only got back to him at ten to five on Friday afternoon, so Henricksen decided to take the files home to read over the weekend. All his work in finding the Winchesters' current location had revealed only a brief sighting of their car in Mississippi, and nothing else. Three days on the case, and he was beginning to realise just how difficult it would be.

Good. He loved a challenge.

It wasn't the most fun he'd ever had on a Friday night, kicking back in his apartment with a beer and pages of autopsy reports, but it was oddly satisfying. Know thy enemy, and then hunt him down, arrest him, and make sure the sonuvabitch was put away for life. And if thy enemy tries to resist, shoot him. It was a straightforward sort of philosophy.

The autopsy reports, on the other hand, were confusing. The photographs of Dean Winchester's dead body were undeniably of Dean's dead body. The body was definitely dead. There had been three silver bullets in the heart. Like he was a friggin' werewolf, Henricksen thought, and took another swig of beer.

The body was also undeniably Dean Winchester. Same haircut, same clothing, same bow legs, identical to the last freckle. Same fingerprints, even. It was Dean Winchester. It could not be anyone else.

But it had to be someone else. Dean Winchester was alive, and had been arrested in Baltimore. The paradox was almost enough to make him break out the brandy.

He read on. The grave the body had been buried in had not been interfered with. The body, once it had been exhumed, had been revealed to be a man in his mid-twenties, about six foot two, the same build as Dean and bowlegged. Henricksen wondered who the poor bastard Dean had killed to take his place in the grave had been. And how the switch had been pulled off. Probably Sam, although he had apparently not been at the funeral.

But then, why would he have been, if his brother wasn't dead? So the switch had already taken place by then. Probably.

What made the whole incident even sicker was that Dean had targeted his own brother's friends from college. Framed one for his girlfriend's murder, and then attempted to murder another. And yet Sam still tagged along with Dean.

Henricksen really couldn't work Sam Winchester out. Dean- well, Dean was, if not a garden-variety psycho, still just a psycho. Sam, however, seemed to have broken away from his father and brother and become a normal college kid. He'd had it all, he'd had it _on a plate_. And as soon as his girlfriend had died, he'd gone right back to his old life.

Well, with Dean offing his college friends, it was no wonder. Sam Winchester didn't seem to be monitoring his email any more. The last time he'd checked was just before the St. Louis incident. That last email had said that his friend was being framed for murder.

Sam was a smart kid; he must have realised what his brother was doing. He must have cut his ties to protect his friends. And with that depressing thought and the last of his beer, Henricksen finished off for the night.

------

He'd meant to actually take the weekend off. Properly. Maybe go see a movie or something, but he had nobody to go with. His last girlfriend had dumped him two months ago, and he'd never had many social friends anyway.

Instead, he went to the local bar and just continued his reading from there.

"Evening, Victor. The usual, or is it a tough case?" the bartender asked when she saw him.

"Tough case, Nicky." The usual was beer; 'tough case' was Nicky's way of asking him whether he wanted some bourbon.

Nicky shook her head. "You look like you could use it. How tough is the case?"

Despite himself, Henricksen smiled. "You know I'm not really supposed to talk about it, but yeah, tough case."

"I'll give you your bourbon without ice, then," was her reply. Henricksen did like Nicky. She was remarkably sensitive to her customers' needs. She was also remarkably good at reading upside down, as he'd discovered about four years ago. Nicky'd be over to chat when custom died down a bit.

Sure enough, around midnight Nicky came over and asked him "So what is it this time? Another fucker framing his ex-wife for multiple murders in multiple states? Some bastard claiming God made him do it?"

Loosened up slightly, Henricksen answered, "This one's special. Best faked death I ever heard of. Found out he was alive last week and we're trying to find him. Bastard almost definitely carved up one woman."

Nicky frowned. "This is all on the public record, right, Victor?"

"Nothing that's not been on the news, sweetheart."

Someone further down the bar called for another drink and Nicky moved away, brown ponytail swinging behind her.

------

He spent his Sunday with a slight hangover, but he went to church all the same. And then he took a break, a real break. He couldn't catch the Winchesters if he wasn't at his best.

Besides, if he started a book he liked to finish it. And he'd started the Stephen King book last weekend, when he was still tracking down run of the mill crooks. He thought that even with this whole Winchester business, he might have the whole series finished in a few months.

------

Henricksen was at work by eight the next morning, bright eyed and bushy tailed, with a list of motels in one hand and a list of credit cards in the other. A map of the US was on the desk in front of him, and occasionally he'd mark a city with red pen. There was a lot of red pen on the map.

"How was your weekend, Jim?" Henricksen asked as his partner made his way to his desk.

"Tiring," Reid said. "I don't know why they call them slumber parties. As far as I can tell nobody sleeps during them, not even the little hostess' family. Any amazing insights during your weekend?"

"Other than Dean somehow swapped the body before his funeral? No."

Reid sighed. "Well, that's not much use."

Henricksen looked back down at his work. "Yeah, I know."

A few hours passed in relatively unproductive work. Henricksen continued to try and track the Winchesters based on credit card usage, but there didn't seem to be a pattern; the Winchesters travelled from town to town completely at random, apparently.

"Seems like the boys had a falling out in St. Louis, Vic," Reid eventually said. "Forensics found the blood of two people in the room where Dean was- shot, and they were definitely brothers." He passed the relevant report over to Henricksen. "All that time in the system, you'd think that we'd have a DNA sample by now."

That was more or less the only thing they found out that day. Henricksen decided to visit St. Louis as well. If the Winchesters were so mobile, he would have to be as well.

------

Rebecca Warren welcomed him into her house quite amicably. But then, Henricksen thought, if your friend's brother had assaulted you, framed your brother, taken off with your friend in tow and had been out of touch ever since, you might not feel too warmly towards them.

"So how did you meet Sam?" he asked her over a cup of tea, after the usual small talk about how she'd been coping.

Rebecca smiled. "We met in Art History."

"Art History? You ever go out with him?"

She laughed. "No, no, it was nothing like that. We hit it off, sure, but only as friends."

"Did he ever talk about his family?"

There it was- just a bit of anger. "Not really. He blew us off when we asked. Just said they weren't exactly the Brady Bunch. We knew his mom was dead, that it was just his father and brother, and that he'd left home after a massive fight with his dad, but that was about it. I don't think he told even Jess much more."

Jess was the name of Sam's dead girlfriend, Henricksen remembered. But Sam wasn't the one who'd carved up that poor girl. Dean was. "His brother assaulted you, right?"

Rebecca's face darkened even more. "It looked like him, but it wasn't."

"Miss Warren, I understand that you insist it wasn't Dean Winchester who attacked you, but let's work under the assumption that he has committed serious crimes elsewhere and killed a young woman. What did you think of him?"

She glared at him. "He was cocky," she said. "A smooth operator. Didn't take anything seriously. To tell the truth, he didn't look very comfortable being around me and Sam. Like he didn't have anything in common with us." She wrinkled her brow. "I guess he didn't. But he was a good guy, all the same."

Henricksen ignored that comment. "Do you know where they went after they left town?"

A shake of the head. "No, sorry. And even if I did, they'd have left ages ago, right? It's been more than a year."

"And you've not heard from Sam since he left?"

Another headshake. "He is okay, right? He's not in trouble or anything?"

"He's healthy, as far as the FBI knows. But I'm afraid that Sam may well be in serious trouble. It depends," Henricksen told her.

"What's wrong? What's happened?" she asked, clearly worried for her friend, however annoyed she may have been that he'd hidden information from her and that his brother had tried to slice her open.

"This is going to be hard for you to hear, but Dean Winchester is not dead. He's alive and escaped police custody last week in Baltimore. As did Sam."

The girl sank back in her chair, bringing her hands to her mouth. "Oh my god. Oh my god. _Sam?_ Sam did something like that?"

There was nothing he could say to that besides, "Yes." But Rebecca did not respond. He frowned. "You're not bothered at all by the news that your attacker escaped?"

Rebecca turned on him. "He wasn't _my attacker_. Someone else did that, but the police won't listen. And no, I won't operate under the assumption that he's killed other people. Get out of my house."

------

Despite the rather disastrous end to the interview, Henricksen felt it hadn't been a wasted trip.


	3. Must Have Left Some Trace Behind

**Disclaimer: **Not mine.

**A/N: **My reviewers rock.

**I Know I Must Have Left Some Traces (Home, In My Time Of Dying)**

More than a week passed after the St. Louis trip. Henricksen had to get himself a second map, because the first was so heavily annotated. The bastards had probably visited every cheap motel in the country by now. Their car had been spotted all over the country, too, sometimes on the same day.

The little he'd found out about the boys' early life said they'd been raised on the road, more or less, moving from one place to another. It was as hard to find out anything about the Winchesters then as it was now. Harder, because people just didn't remember two kids in a classic car. They just remembered the car.

But seriously, Henricksen thought, why would the family do this? What sort of whack job was John Winchester?

Well, if it provided some insight into the methodology of his sons, it was probably worth checking out. Anything was, really. Know thy enemy. Know how he works. Know why he works this way. This is even more important when there's not much information about them to start with.

Henricksen's boss knew and approved of this tactic, fortunately.

So, Henricksen began poking into John Winchester's life as well. He'd been in the Marines and served in Vietnam. He'd known that already. After John Winchester had returned, he'd moved to Kansas for some unknown reason and become a mechanic. He'd met and married a local girl named Mary. They'd been married for five years when Mary had died in a fire.

Just like Sam's girlfriend had died. Someone upstairs didn't like the kid.

A visit to Lawrence (and all the travelling was becoming incredibly wearing, only a third of his trips worth the time and energy) to talk to John's former business partner proved to be more profitable than expected, when Mr. Guenther had offhandedly mentioned that two detectives had come through last year looking for John.

"What were their names?" Henricksen asked, curious.

"Dunno. Can't remember," Guenther said.

But Henricksen wasn't about to give up so easily. "Can you remember what they looked like, what kind of car they drove, anything?"

Guenther thought for a while. "Well, one of them was real tall. And yeah, I remember the car. Classic, that was. 67 Impala. Near perfect condition."

Henricksen thanked the man and left town quietly. Nobody remembered two kids in a classic car. They just remembered the car. And, apparently, just how tall Sam Winchester was.

He thought he had an idea about what the boys were doing.

------

"So let me get this straight," Reid said when they were both back at base together for the first time that month. "The boys are looking for their father?"

"I think so," Henricksen replied. "Except he's much better at hiding than they are. Look, around the same time Dean shows up in Palo Alto, John Winchester vanishes entirely. Last recorded sighting I can find so far is in Jericho, California. Dean was arrested there about three days after John disappeared from his motel room."

Reid looked puzzled. "And when was this?"

Henricksen shuffled through his notes. "About eighteen months ago…the weekend before Sam's law school interview, actually. The cops had no idea who they'd picked up, but they found a note in some book of John's with Dean's name and some numbers in it. Dean took the book, but the cop remembered the numbers too. Turns out John didn't leave the Marines behind- they were coordinates. And both boys were seen in the area after the Palo Alto incident."

His partner looked impressed. "So that's what you've been doing while you were away. I've just been going through these fake IDs, seeing what they've been doing with them. Lot of checking out police records, the odd academic department, a few birth records in Iowa, nothing I can make head or tail out of."

"All the same, it's a breakthrough, and I am going to get a drink to celebrate. It's been ages since I've been in town. Coming, Jim?" Henrickson asked,

Reid shook his head. "Just want to finish off with these IDs. I'll see you tomorrow."

------

"Victor! Haven't seen you in a while," Nicky said when she spotted him entering her bar. "What're you after?"

"A beer, thanks," he said. "Got my suspects nearly figured out."

Nicky grinned. "Knew you had it in you. One beer, coming right up."

He was halfway through it when his phone rang. "Henricksen."

"I need you back here, Vic. Something came up with that last ID," Reid said, voice tinny over the phone.

"On my way." He hung up. "Sorry, Nicky, got to go. Duty calls."

She looked up from the bench she was wiping. "Go get 'em, tiger."

------

"What's up, Jim?" Henricksen asked the moment his partner was in earshot.

Stood up to allow Henricksen access to his computer screen. This ID. Not one of the boys', one of John's.Elroy McGillicuddy, health insurance card.

"Elroy McGillicuddy?"

"Not as bad as Ted Nugent, Vic."

"One day, I swear, one of these guys is going to sign for something with the name Hasselhoff. Fifty bucks says it's Dean."

"No bet. Anyway, I run this ID. Turns out that our friend Elroy died in hospital a few months ago."

Henricksen blinked. "Are you sure it's John Winchester?"

"Positive."

"How do you know?"

"First, McGillicuddy checked in with his two sons."

Henricksen rolled his eyes. "That's a fair indicator. Anything else?"

Reid nodded. "All three sustained injuries in a car crash. Their 67 Chevy Impala was totalled."

"That's definitely them. Also explains why John's completely off the grid these days," Henricksen mused. "What happened?"

"Here's where it gets bizarre. John Winchester- sorry, Elroy McGillicuddy- wasn't injured that badly. Gunshot wound to the leg, a few cuts and bruises, a broken arm. Nothing too dramatic as far as the Winchesters go. Sam was only banged up a bit. It was Dean who was cactus."

"What's bizarre about that?" Henriksen asked. "It was a car crash, right?"

Reid raised his eyebrows. "Well, Dean was in a coma. Except he suddenly wakes up, completely healed. Completely. And about twenty minutes later, Daddy Winchester abruptly drops dead for no apparent reason. Kinda spooky, eh?"

"Who shot him?"

"No idea. Sam's statement said that they were held up, and while they were driving to hospital a semi crashed into them. But it was a silver bullet they removed from John's leg, and I've only ever heard of the Winchesters using honest-to-god silver bullets." Reid snorted. "This family is so fucked up it's almost funny."

------

Henricksen would dearly have loved to return to the bar for some bourbon. Instead, he read over the accident reports himself. If he didn't know better, he would have said it looked like the semi was gunning for the Winchesters' car.

He traced the Impala. It was easier than tracking the Winchesters, even with the plates changed. The local police had it towed to a nearby scrap yard. And it had been towed again, despite its abysmal condition. The yard had one solitary, ancient CCTV camera.

It was an odd parody of a night in, watching the football with a beer in hand. Instead, he sat in front of the station TV with a bottle of water, fast-forwarding through fuzzy images of the occasional car being towed away. Mostly it was just dust.

But then early one morning the Winchesters' car was heaved from the lot, looking like it would fall apart if someone so much as tapped it. Henricksen didn't know much about cars, but he thought it would take a hell of a lot to rebuild that one. But what really struck him was that the man towing the car was not Sam Winchester. Instead, it was an older man with a short beard wearing a baseball cap. More than that, he couldn't see from the poor footage.

He sent the tape off to the video specialists, to see if they could get plates, an ID, anything. But the angles were all wrong and the back of the tow truck was covered in dried mud, obscuring the plates. Henricksen let out a frustrated sigh. He couldn't even track down someone willing to tow the car.

This was just not his day.

------

The next week was fairly quiet, Winchester-wise. Dean picked up another traffic violation, this time running a red light. Agent Cook started saying that when Henricksen finally found the Winchesters, he'd only be able to get them for parking tickets, like Al Capone and his income tax.

Henricksen didn't like Agent Cook all that much, really.

In fact, only two interesting things happened that week. First, Agent Symonds succeeded in catching the serial killer he'd been after for six months, and second, a little town in Oregon vanished overnight.

"It's just weird, man," the junior agent on the case told Henricksen. "One day everyone was there, and the next, bam! Nobody! Nobody except for a lady doctor in town and another in a car about a mile down the road, both with their throats slashed."

Henricksen listened to the story with disbelief the first time, but when Reid assured him that it was actually true, he filed it under "unexplained curiosities that have no bearing on my case".

Day after day the trail got colder. He couldn't find the Winchester boys. He couldn't find out even where they had buried their father, though apparently they had visited their mother's gravestone. He'd found John Winchester's dogtags under a clod of soil there. Reid had stopped him taking them with a hand on his arm. Instead, he stored the memory of the dogtags and their location for when he interrogated the boys who had put them there.

It was cold, he knew. But damned if he let them get away.


	4. Interlude

**Disclaimer: **Not mine.

**A/N: **Well, sorry about the delay. The chapter after this was giving me fits, and I didn't want to leave you with just this for a few days. My apologies.

**Interlude**

The phone rang.

"Hey, Bobby, it's Ellen here."

"Ellen! Now what prompts such a call?"

Ellen's voice lowered, probably to avoid her patrons overhearing the conversation. "You seen the news tonight?"

"No."

"Go do it."

There was a pause while Bobby went to his ancient television set and turned it on. "What channel?" he asked.

"Any one with news."

Another pause, longer this time, while the news was watched and digested.

"Shit."

"I know you've been helping those boys, Bobby. They're going to have the F.B.I. on their trail now, if they didn't before."

"I've been around, Ellen."

"You've got a cover story, don't you? One that doesn't incriminate any of you?"

"I'll work something out. What about you? I heard they were hunting with your daughter."

"Yeah, well, they were. But in the meantime, what do I know about the Winchesters? I'm just a bartender."

"I appreciate the warning, Ellen."

"Not a problem."

Nothing left to say, they hung up at the same time.


	5. Long Nights

**Disclaimer: **Not mine.

**A/N: **Posted quick because I didn't want to leave you with just the interlude.

**Long Nights (Nightshifter, Nightmare)**

As he looked at the two SWAT men, who had been bound, gagged and stripped, Henricksen had one thought.

The Winchester boys were _good_.

Oh, sure, people had evaded the FBI before. They'd stayed on the run for ages. Some of them the FBI had never found. But escaping from a bank surrounded by police and SWAT forces…that took guts and skill. Well, if they were playing a game, they would damn well play his game. They'd be looking over their shoulders for him wherever they went.

_Wherever _they went. He smiled.

------

He and Reid conducted the interviews with the unfortunate SWAT boys personally. Mostly it was Reid's job to watch, listen and generally observe- it was Henricksen's case after all.

The interviews didn't take that long.

"So let me get this straight. Your buddies turned to escort the girl from the building, and you and your partner rounded the corner, and saw another intruder."

"Yes, sir," the SWAT member- Carlson?- replied.

"So you both aimed your guns at him."

"Yes, sir. According to procedure, sir."

Henricksen didn't doubt that. Both men had spotless records as far as procedure was concerned. Besides, he'd impressed on the whole group just how dangerous these two were before the SWAT team had entered the building. They'd have taken anyone trying to evade their custody seriously.

"And what happened next?"

Carlson shook his head. "Well, sir, we went to handcuff him, and the fucker turned around, laid Porter out, took his gun and then hit me. Woke up in the closet not long afterwards without my clothes. Porter was still out cold."

"So he took you both out? Unarmed?" Henricksen was afraid there was a trace of admiration in his voice, but really, it wasn't anyone who could take down two armed opponents while being unarmed himself.

Carlson scowled. "Yes, sir. The bastard can fight. We couldn't get near 'im."

He slid a picture of each Winchester brother across the table. "Which one was it?"

Carlson didn't even blink before sliding the picture of Sam Winchester back to him. "That one, sir. Big fucker." He leaned back in his chair. "Funny, he really don't look all that mean."

------

The incident turned out to be a bit more complicated than Henricksen initially thought it would be. Bank robbery. Hostage situation. Didn't play out like a normal hostage situation, but then nothing did with the Winchesters.

But then there was no money missing, and piles of skin that DNA testing stubbornly identified as belonging to each of the dead bodies found at the scene. Bodies that had definitely not been skinned.

And then there was the matter of that girl, Sherri something. They'd found her twin dead, most of the skin missing from her arm. But there was no record of Sherri the Bank Employee ever having had a sister. Sherri herself denied it, and claimed the Winchesters had saved her.

Henricksen had conducted that interview too. "I'm telling you that thing, that thing looked oh my god like me and it was lying on the floor with its throat already cut oh my god but then they looked away from it and it got up and attacked him oh my god oh my god oh my god," was just about as coherent a statement he could get out of her.

Then she'd looked up at him with her big, teary eyes and said simply, "they saved me."

What was it about the Winchesters that drove perfectly normal people, especially women, insane? Surely it couldn't be just good looks.

Then there was Ronald the conspiracy theory nut, shot dead before the end of the little drama. It looked like Ronald had been the one to initiate the hostage situation, chaining the doors shut. What little footage there was showed the Winchesters, who may or may not have been at the bank with the intention of killing three people, taking control of the situation.

The whole thing made no _sense_, Henricksen thought. Weird inconsistencies, a complete lack of logic, very little pattern…

It was still illegal though, and that was the important point.

------

Henricksen returned to his motel after hours on the job, interviewing people, taking statements, working out _what the hell had happened_. After the flashing red and blue lights of the scene, and then the gritty police station atmosphere, he was willing to admit the neutral colours and relative peace of his moderately priced hotel room was sort of comforting.

He didn't go to sleep immediately though, still too wired from the day's action and the coffee he'd drunk to last through it. Outside, it was dark, about four in the morning. He'd never been the lying-awake type before this case.

When he did fall asleep, he dreamed of Sam Winchester clubbing him unconscious with his own gun and Dean Winchester's eyes sparkling maliciously from behind a SWAT mask, while his voice echoed back to Henricksen, "You don't know shit."

------

Over the next few days he didn't sleep much. Dean's whisper, even out of context, stung. "You don't know shit." It haunted him when he was doing the paperwork, when he was obsessively scouring reports of black cars given tickets, when he was calling to investigate badge thefts and credit card fraud.

You don't know shit.

He was terse with Reid, even. No progress was being made at all. The boys had gone to ground in a big way. As far as he knew, Dean had driven his car off a road and was living in it, sending Sam out for food every so often.

You don't know shit.

The dream he'd had that first night after the bank never recurred, but he didn't forget it. "You got to take a break, Vic," Reid said to him after one particularly unproductive day. "You can't let it get to you like this."

"And what should I be doing, Jim?" Henricksen had snapped back. "Should I let Dean Winchester just murder whoever he feels like? Should I let Sam Winchester tag along like it's a _joyride_? Cause that's what happens if I don't keep working at this case." He'd been shouting by the end of that little speech.

Reid's face had shuttered off. "Fine. Just remember to take care of yourself." Henricksen had been left sitting alone in the office, lit only by his desk lamp. He looked at the photograph of a smiling Dean he had pinned on the bulletin board. You don't know shit, it seemed to laugh at him.

He threw himself back into the piles of paper on his desk. There was a pattern emerging, slowly and painfully. The Winchesters showed up in a town. They stayed in a motel for a few days, spending more time at a library, or a hospital, or a police station, or a local deserted house, or sometimes a cemetery than in their room. Some violence, grave desecration or other criminal act would occur. Then the Winchesters would leave for another town.

It was knowing which town they would go to next that was the hard part. There was nothing, nothing, the towns they visited had in common. Most of them recorded some sort of death in the weeks before. Other times, like that incident in Saginaw he suspected the Winchesters had been present, the deaths had started more or less with their arrival.

Henricksen actually liked the Winchesters for the Miller deaths- murders, he suspected. Roger Miller's death was supposedly a tragic accident, and Max Miller had been a basket case, but it was an awfully big coincidence that just as the Winchesters showed up, the Millers started dying. Of course, there was no physical evidence either way, aside from one witness report of two men fitting the Winchesters' descriptions leaving Roger Miller's apartment block around the time of the death, and the mentally unstable Alice Miller's statement that her stepson had shot himself, even though the kid had clearly been shot from across the room.

Christ, was there no woman in the lower forty-eight states who wouldn't defend the Winchesters?

He noticed in passing that Max Miller's mother had died in a fire, like Mary Winchester and Jessica Moore. The Winchesters were good at piling up that sort of coincidence.

Yawning, he put the notes on Saginaw aside and picked up the Milwaukee files again. He was rereading them for the seventh time in five days, trying to discover some new insight in the pages when he fell asleep at his desk, Dean Winchester still whispering to him about his ignorance.

------

Agent Cook, usually the first to his desk, jolted him awake with an obscenely cheerful "Wakey-wakey, Special Agent Sleepyhead! Time to go to work!"

Cook wasn't trying to be a colossal pain in the ass, Henricksen knew. It was just that he didn't have to try. "Go away," Henricksen grumbled at him without raising his head from his desk.

All credit to him, Cook didn't blink. "Easy there, Vic. I brought you some coffee. Thought you might need it."

Henricksen accepted the steaming mug. "Thanks, but you know this hardly counts as coffee, right?"

Cook rolled his eyes. "Fine," he said, and went to his own desk, crisp-suited and razor sharp. Henricksen groaned softly. It wasn't going to be a good day.

------

It wasn't. His boss chewed him out for his dishevelled appearance, though he was more sympathetic about the lack of progress being made. "I've had a quick look through some of your stuff, Vic. Those sons of bitches are good at hiding," he had said. It was code for 'but you're better at finding'.

Reid had a cold, and was a displeasure to work with. Agent Cook, still a bit huffy over the snub to his office coffee- Henricksen hadn't known he was so sensitive- was irritatingly chipper all day.

To top things off, no progress was made, and Dean Winchester's photograph was still smirking and whispering from the bulletin board.

You don't know shit, Victor, it said. You don't know shit about where we are. You don't know shit about where we've been. You don't know shit about what we're doing, about what we've done. You don't know shit about me, or Sam.

"Shut up!" Henricksen finally snapped at the picture, earning a wearied glance from Reid and an amused one from Cook.

He'd definitely had better days.


	6. The Background Details

**Disclaimer: **Not mine.

**A/N: **Sorry it took me a while to update. It'll probably take me even longer to update again, because life has become that little bit more complicated, and by that I mean I'm up to my ears in work. Thanks to everyone who's reviewed so far- you're all great.

And just so you know, this chapter takes place around "Heart".

**The Background Details (no episode)**

You don't know shit about my dad. That was what Dean Winchester had said. Their father. Perhaps there was more to John Winchester than his supremacist-terrorist-sociopathic child-raising.

Damned if Henricksen knew what it was, though.

Nevertheless, he re-examined John Winchester's files. He'd only looked at the man's whereabouts and child-raising, and only as a means of finding and knowing the sons. He'd not looked at John Winchester in his own right.

Normally he'd never have considered something as half-baked as this, but he was getting a bit desperate. Nobody had seen hide or hair of the Winchesters, nor the rearview mirror of their car, nor a number of a fake credit card, for more than a week. Before this, he'd thought it impossible for Dean Winchester to go a fortnight without a minor traffic infringement.

John's rap sheet was longer than his elder son's, but contained far fewer serious charges. Just relatively petty credit card fraud, mail fraud, burglary, trespass, destruction of property and grave desecration charges. And not a single traffic violation, he noticed. And Christ, the man knew how to hide. As far as he could tell, the man has dematerialised from his Jericho motel room. It was almost galling to realise that he doubted that he couldn't track John Winchester.

It was even more galling that the Winchester boys apparently _could_ track their father, to a certain extent.

Henricksen shuffled through the files, going further back still. Ah, this looked interesting. An incident report from 1995, involving the death of one William Harvelle in a hunting accident. According to this, John accidentally shot Harvelle through the head and the bear they were hunting subsequently mauled him, adding insult to injury. Though, Henricksen supposed, it wasn't as if William Harvelle would care, not after being shot in the head.

William Harvelle had left behind a wife and daughter. In fact, the wife's statement mentioned that John had been close to the family. He looked up the wife's current address- apparently she ran the family bar.

He was off. And if anyone saw that Impala, they could just call him.

------

He pulled up to Harvelle's Roadhouse at ten in the morning the next day, rain splattering against the windshield. The inside of the bar was dim and dusty, nothing like the clean polished wood in his favourite bar in Washington. He couldn't see Nicky working here at all. The only person there, in fact, was a young-ish man passed out on the pool table. Henricksen pulled up a chair and sat down at the bar.

About thirty seconds later, seemingly alerted by whatever bartender sixth sense, a hard-eyed blonde woman of around forty appeared from a back room. "Can I help you?" she asked, clearly suspicious.

"I'd like to talk to you about John Winchester," he said, without preamble.

Her eyes narrowed. "Cop?"

Henricksen wasn't really surprised. Harvelle's Roadhouse looked like a fairly rough place. Even if it wasn't particularly rough, enough criminal types would have come through for cops to come through later, looking for them. Mrs. Harvelle probably just didn't want trouble. "Special Agent Victor Henricksen, F.B.I."

"Lemme see the badge," she demanded.

When he flipped it open, she looked long and hard at it, as though it might trash her bar. Seemingly satisfied with its veracity, though not its presence, she straightened up and said, "So what do you want to know about John?"

"You can start with how you met."

Mrs. Harvelle shrugged. "Not much to tell. John came in here one night, must have been near fifteen years ago now. Rented a room for a few days. Third night, he broke up a fight for me and after that we got to talking."

"But he came back?" Henricksen asked.

"Well of course he did. Started dropping in when he was in the area. My Jo adored him."

He wondered why. It wasn't as if John Winchester had been a model parent. "Did he ever tell you anything about himself?" was his next question.

Mrs. Harvelle gave him an assessing sort of look, gauging something about him. After a second or so she seemed to come to a decision. "He lost his wife. Said something started a fire in his house. Spent his time going from town to town with his boys. Never knew exactly what it was he did, though. Only time he really talked was when he was drunk."

"_Something_ started a fire in his house? Like an electrical fault?"

Mrs. Harvelle shook her head again. "Like something that deliberately lit a fire in his house. He was never real clear on that. Could be because he only talked about it just before the alcohol knocked him out."

This conversation was going some way to confirming what Henricksen had suspected for some time. John Winchester was a crazy bastard. "Can you tell me about the accident?" he asked, wondering what sort of response he'd get.

Ellen Harvelle's already hard gaze became distinctly harder as she said, "I can't imagine there's anything I can tell you that's not on the police report."

"Humour me. Tell me what you remember."

"Fine then," she almost snapped, "John went out with my Bill to hunt bears. I stayed home to watch Jo. Two days later, I get a call from the police saying there had been an accident and Bill was dead. John came by the day after to apologise. After that…well, we didn't see much of him after that."

Oh, really. How strange. "What did you think of John? Personally?"

"John Winchester was the most stubborn son of a bitch I ever met. He wouldn't tell anyone anything unless he absolutely had to. He had a nasty temper, and flatly refused to change his ways. But-" and she was smiling a bit now- "he was a good man. He loved his wife and his boys more than anything. Don't you doubt that."

Oh dear lord, these Winchesters and their women. John had _shot_ this woman's husband, and she still defended him. "You ever sleep with him?"

Mrs. Harvelle did a double take, then straightened proudly. "Now you look here, Special Agent. There's nobody, but nobody, who comes in here and says things like that to me. Bill was my husband. Not John. So don't you dare imply anything of that nature."

Henricksen was prepared to believe her, though he probably shouldn't. He'd back off. On this issue. And only this issue. "Did you ever actually meet his sons?"

"Not until a few months ago. They dropped in to tell my their father had died." Goddamn. Even this woman had known before he did. But Mrs. Harvelle was speaking again. "You're looking for them, aren't you?"

He nodded. "A murder in St. Louis and bank robbery," he said. "I could go on and on."

She was glaring at him again. "Now, bank robbery, maybe, most people who come through here look like they'd be well up to it, but neither of them struck me as the type who'd murder anyone."

"So you know them quite well?"

Mrs. Harvelle seemed to realise that she'd misjudged. "I wouldn't say quite well. They've been here a few times. Stopped coming perhaps three months back." Before Milwaukee. Damn. Must have suspected he'd find this place and cut Mrs. Harvelle off.

"Do you know where they are now?" he persisted.

Mrs. Harvelle tossed her hair back. "Your guess is as good as mine. Hell, it's probably better."

Henricksen sighed and thanked Mrs. Harvelle for her time. She didn't thank him on his way out.

------

The rain had stopped by the time he'd reached the bland chain hotel room he would be staying in that night, though it was still damp and grey outside. Rather like his mood. Interesting- fascinating- as that little trip had been, it wasn't terrible useful. It was just another room where the Winchesters had stayed, just another bar they had drunk at, just another woman they had charmed.

Mind you, John's belief that some_thing_ had deliberately started the fire in his home wasn't a completely useless bit of information. Perhaps he was delusional and the boys felt some sort of responsibility. He fished the reports on the fire in Lawrence out of his files. Electrical fault in the ceiling of Sam's room, it said. No way it could have been deliberately lit.

That sounded familiar to him for some reason. But he couldn't place it.

He returned the report on the fire to his notes and withdrew his previous notes on the Harvelles. It really didn't seem like there was much more to Ellen than what she had appeared to be- the proprietor of a run-down bar in the middle of nowhere. The daughter, Jo, had left the Roadhouse a few months before. He wished he'd had a chance to speak to her. Perhaps the Winchester boys would have opened up more to someone closer to their own age. He moved onto Bill Harvelle's file.

Among some petty crimes- vandalism, trespassing, minor assault- there were two convictions of grave desecration.

------

Ellen stared at the doorway for a few seconds after the Fed departed. She had cops in here quite often, usually pretending to be regular patrons. She could spot them from a mile away. It wasn't often the Feds came all the way out here.

It was even less frequently the Feds came out here with information on John Winchester. In fact, she couldn't recall _anyone_ coming around asking about John. But then, the man could hide from his own sons, and they had the advantage of knowing most of his tricks. Small wonder he managed to hide from the cops for so long.

Sam and Dean, now, they were less circumspect.

Correction. Dean was less circumspect. If Sam had his way he would probably spend hours bleaching down every place they went.

It didn't matter now. The Feds were after them, and they were chasing the boys by chasing John. Or trying to chase John. Ellen snorted quietly under her breath. Good luck there. They'd be chasing a ghost, almost literally.

She wondered if the Fed was happy with what she'd told him. There shouldn't be any reason for him to revisit the Roadhouse. She hadn't mentioned Jo, so the Fed wouldn't know about that hunting incident and chase her down. Bill was dead and buried. And the Fed had dismissed Ash as just another drunk.

All in all, Ellen thought, it hadn't gone too badly.


End file.
